Like Drowning
by brenli
Summary: [[The Little Mermaid AU]] Love is like drowning; it strains and it burns and it smothers... and it is utter euphoria, worth the risk.


_Foreword: The following is a genderbent Little Mermaid AU piece… Yeah. I said it. A genderbent Little Mermaid AU piece. With Michael in the titular role. I'm not entirely certain what conditions caused this to become a project I actually started working on, all I know is that I'm not all that sorry about it._

 _While this has its roots as an Angel Sanctuary gone Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid AU, this piece features Nemaelle Mudou, OC for my Chronicles of the Fallen series. It will also eventually incorporate Azreal, OC for HaloRecoil's Coming of the Seraph series, and Zephyrel, OC for Jael Randell's Eve of the Earth series (who long-time members of the readership likely know as the cowriter for CotF's second installment, Layers)._

* * *

 **Like Drowning  
** _Entering the New World  
_ By: Brenli

He stared at the shining pieces of metal and the porcelain, flat circle upon which food had been placed. Green, weedy looking things with bits of... other things in them. He leaned ever closer, eyes as blue-green as the ocean peering hard at the vegetation. _Like_ seaweed, but... not seaweed.

What in the name of the seven damn seas _was_ that stuff...?

He became acutely aware of the all the faces staring at him, and he looked up and around at all of them. Still, he was hunched deeply over his plate, so low that the scallop's shell flanked by shark teeth, strung about his neck in old string he'd found in one of the shipwrecks, nearly dipped into the not-seaweed.

A laugh, muffled, came from somewhere to his right, and his glare came fast as a riptide, dark and much more green than blue. He wasn't sorry for being confused about the _stuff_ they were offering for him to put in his mouth. Fuck, like it was hard to tell him what it was? You give somebody something they're not familiar with; you _explain_ what it is! He would've, if their positions were switched!

… Except for the mute thing. Except for that.

The double doors opened with an unapologetic swiftness, a boy blowing into a trumpet to call everyone to attention, an older man announcing the newest arrivals. The important arrivals. But that didn't make any sense to him, either... The great big show. Sure, he could see the good in it – he'd be lying if he said he didn't want any of that particular kind of fanfare, for himself; it seemed amazing – but why? They walked into a room. They were about to eat. Big deal. Everyone eats, whether you dwell on land or in the sea.

But oh, she came in behind her parents, 'Her' and 'Highness' and 'the' and 'Princess' slipping in one ear and out of the other, only the name Nemaelle staying behind, like the way the sound of the ocean lived on inside empty seashells. For her, he would forget the not-seaweed on his flat porcelain circle and sit up straight, eyes more like the blue of calmer water. He had hoped that making his reckless decision would mean he could see her often, yet thus far he'd only seen her for terribly brief moments. It made each space of time all the more precious. All the more powerful, hitting him hard in his chest like waves breaking over rocks. Yet again he felt himself elated that she looked well, that her hair white as sea foam caught the light perfectly, that her skin held a glow that put that white marble statue of her to utter shame. Pearl would've been better. Pearl would've been perfect, actually, and yet again he sent out an aimless curse that she wasn't like pearl. That she wasn't born from a shell or something. That she wasn't of the sea, just like him.

That was why he was here, trading in his voice for two awkward, less flexible, jointed... _things_. Legs. Honestly, he hated legs, but for his pearl, he would work with them. He hoped that with the limited time granted to him, he'd get used to them. They couldn't have been that difficult, right? Nemaelle had legs... wonderful legs. Perfect damn legs. She made having legs look effortless and beautiful.

He realized that everyone was standing in order to receive their important people... Shit, he needed to _stand?_ Surprised and flustered, his chair scraped too loud against the floor, and standing sent a stiff, alien kind of pain through him that he couldn't describe even if he still had his voice. But the onset of it was enough to make him twitch and stumble, planting his hands quickly and clumsily on the table with loud thumps before righting himself.

Again, everyone was staring at him, including his pearl. But at least she seemed appropriately concerned, and that was enough to make him not care a damn bit about what anybody else thought about his damn struggle with those damn things land dwellers _somehow_ used to get around...!

"Are you okay?" She asked, and seemed ready to move over to him until she'd received questioning glances from her parents. She settled for folding her worried, pearl-pale hands together against her stomach like he saw so many women here do, and asking him another concerned question. "Are you still hurting?"

He shook his head in reply, but also because he couldn't believe that after what she'd been through only days before, she'd ask the things he was aching to ask her. Was she okay, after being trapped in a sinking vessel that went impossibly deeper into the sea than she'd ever been? Was she still hurting, like she had been when her chest burned and felt ready to burst, like when he had her in his arms and the ocean finally won against her, flooding her lungs? He'd thought she was dead, as soon as the air left her mouth in an underwater cloud of bubbles. He supposed others would have given up, then, realizing the utter separation between those of the land and those of the sea... but not him. No, he took her straight to the nearest shore, blew air into her mouth, realized the stiff... _thing_ around her midriff kept the air out, tore that accursed piece of clothing off and threw it hard into the ocean for all his anger. Only then did his poor pearl cough up the water that couldn't sustain her. Only then, with her weakly gripping onto his wrist, did the weight of their impossible situation settle over him. That was why he was here...

If anyone was going to suffer for even the slightest chance they might be together, it wasn't going to be her. It was going to be him.

"You're fine?" She asked again, and she ignored the comments from her parents – things about how he clearly seemed fine, things about how he couldn't reply to begin with – in favor of smiling when he nodded in confirmation, as soft and warm as sunrise on his skin after spending all night watching land dwellers be merry on their ships. Watching her appear one evening, a great big moon shining down on her as she stared out into dark and mysterious waters, a look of wonder coloring her face. He'd felt the urge to reach for her and pull her into the depths, to bring her home. Sanity and the memory of finding men's skeletons in sunken ships kept him from acting on that need... pushed him to an entirely different insane action. Abandoning all that he knew for nothing guaranteed...

Everyone sat down for the beginning of the meal, his body collapsing into his chair without an ounce of grace. Legs didn't make _sense!_ But oh, even as worried as she was, his pearl moved as smooth as though she belonged underwater. One pale hand reached out, and on instinct he reached out in kind, fingertips tapping once against hers before she pulled away with a laugh.

"I give you leave not to rise whenever we enter a room."

"Nemaelle..." Her father quietly scolded her.

But she insisted with a soft frown. "He's still recuperating, father, can't you see that? Be reasonable..."

He couldn't help it. He couldn't help but puff out in some inexplicable kind of pride, a pride he could feel all over his face as he smiled at the King. If he had to guess by the King's surprised pause and sudden urgency to redirect conversation, his pearl wasn't in the habit of confronting her parents about things. But he, the man who'd washed ashore naked and unable to walk worth a damn. He was worth it.

A hopeful sign, or just him being delusional? He preferred to take his happiness where he could, and smiled brightly enough to make her smile in kind...

The moment washed away as soon as it rose up, with her attentions being taken away on some half-hearted conversation about the pieces of metal on either side of their porcelain circles. Strange little pieces he'd never really understood... tridents too small to be of any real use, and things vaguely shaped like half of a mussel's shell, attached to the end of a handle, for whatever damn reason. The thin blade-shaped things where nice, though; he used those often and for all sorts of purposes.

His pearl was holding up a worthlessly tiny trident along with her mother, who was pointing out something interesting about it being white gold, whatever white gold was. He thought gold was those little yellow flat circles of metal that sailors and pirates on their ships liked to hunt for...

He picked up one of the two stupidly small tridents as everyone else conversed, and in all his confusion, gently scratched the little prongs against his temple, then pulled it through a lock of red hair. To date, it was the only thing he could think to use the tiny tridents for – to scratch at things, to untangle things like hair or jellyfish tentacles whenever one got stupid and tried to go after Azreal, not used to the idea of a fish like her straying so far from reefs and anemones.

Again he was acutely aware of a gasp coming from his pearl's mother, and looked up from the not-seaweed to see everyone looking at him. Even his pearl, mouth agape, confused. What _now?_ All he could do was blink and continue scratching at his scalp with the trident, then pulling it through his hair to keep it from getting tangled.

The judgments weighed on him more and more, but his pearl was a safe harbor from the unspoken storm building within everyone else. For all their bizarre bewilderment, she smiled and laughed. She was patient. She was kind... She deserved better than to be amongst all these snobby and unhelpful two-legged folk. "No, ah... no..." She smiled and held out her trident. "These aren't combs..."

Comb? Like the comb shell? His brows pinched together when he realized he was mouthing nothing to her.

But she was more patient with him than he had ever been with himself. "It's a fork. See..." He watched her stab the trident into the not-seaweed like she was delicately hunting, and placed the bite into her mouth.

So they really _were_ tridents! Very small tridents, but tridents nonetheless! He set down the one he'd put in his hair, grabbing the clean one, and heard a small sigh come from his pearl's mother.

"Mother..." Her voice was a pleading caress.

He watched her mother's big brown eyes shift from him to her daughter... and then she covered her mouth with her folding fan and whispered.

His pearl had no interest in censoring their conversation. "Well his salad fork is dirty, now. What is he supposed to do?" She set down her own salad trident – if they were originally holding salad tridents, what was the other trident called? – and picked up her second trident.

"Nema." Her mother scolded.

"It won't kill us to lick the forks clean when we're done with the salad." His pearl turned playful eyes, supportive eyes toward him. "Will it?"

No, of course it wouldn't. Was that the whole reason why there were multiple tridents, uh, forks on the table? He showed his agreement with a smile, setting his elbows on the table with a forceful bit of gusto that sent the entire dinner party up in gasps.

Everyone but his pearl, who also set her elbows upon the table, though with a gentle grace that made him wonder how she wasn't one of the merfolk, to begin with.

As they ate, and he marveled over tiny tridents and not-seaweed, he sent out another aimless curse. Why couldn't she have been a mermaiden? Why couldn't she have been of the sea...?


End file.
